Daren teaching in the weak and feeble English sunshine

There are usually between twelve and fourteen students here at any one time, this ensures that when you need attention, almost always you can get it on a one to one basis. It may be misleading to call these people "students" these men and women would typically be in their late twenties to early fourties and would come here as a career change. We also find many people are comming here after a university course in design or a similar allied course.

Most w ant to take a year then get back to earning money, but this time either working for themselves or for a high quality workshop as an "improver" furniture maker, [ an improver is someone not fully trained who maybe slow but competant who should get faster and earn more in a relatively short time]. We have been running these courses now since 1983 so by now we have really got the hang of it and are able to make your time here really really productive.

Learn how to make quality work, do it really well, the professional way.

There are many, many photographs of work done by people who have come, from all walks of life to Rowden Workshops and learnt how to make. Quality is what we do, you will do it too, from day one. We will teach you everything from choosing handtools to picking out wood to developing your drawings and building a portfolio of work. There are lots of courses and magazines that are great for showing you an amateur way of getting a good result. An amateur has no excuse for poor work other than lack of understanding, the amateur has all day to get it right, the professional has not.

True Skill is excellent work done quickly and efficiently.

You will not get quick in this year, but you will get good and the techniques we teach will be "short steppable ' you can speed them up as you gain confidence and so, work faster. These are techniques that are tested in the fire of real professional workshops working at the top of their field, you will learn the same professional methods we have used in our work for over thirty years.

• learn slow and accurate get confidence then get faster.
• learn how you can function inside a professional workshop.
• earn a real job in a top workshop as "an improver"
• learn how to set up your own workshop and find your own customers.

Learn from genuine experts with a lifetime of experience in this furniture making business, who are also passionate to share it with you.

This is David Savage - this guy is one of the worlds most respected furniture designer makers, he has over 30 years experience, and will be sharing it directly with you.

"I have been making and designing furniture all my life, when I started everyone thought I was barking mad, indeed a streak of madness helps a lot! Back in the late 1970s there were very few sucessfull furniture making workshops. I made it my goal to become the principal of a small sucessfull design led business. I would be working alongside skilled makers, giving exceptional customer service to my clients and making furniture I could be really proud of, and at the same time making a living decent enough to pay the family school fees. I have made almost all the mistakes that it is possible to make, I want you to not have to make same those mistakes. My aims now at an age approaching 60, is firstly, to build a new body of devastatingly good furniture during the comming 20 years and secondly help, encourage, and inspire you to have the kind of great furniture making life I have had." Have a look at the gallery to see more of David Savages work.

In "Bespoke" a recently published book in 2008 on British Furniture Designer Makers one in every ten designer makers featured had been trained by David Savage. He has been teaching people since 1984. This is not allowing for the hundreds of other less high profile makers that he trained functioning well is small and large workshops all over the world. Rowden workshops are now recognised as a Centre of Woodworking Excellence that produces exception furniture and trains exceptional woodworkers. You could be one of them.

"Its not about qualifications or prior experience.

You could come here not knowing which end of a chisel was the sharp end. What matters is OOOmmph... are you the kind of personality that can take this on and make a go of it ? Will you get on with the other people in the workshop and help when somone else needs a hand with a glue up? Do you have the kind of personality that is not easily defeated or deflated. If so I may have a place for you at Rowden Workshops ." david savage

It is not unusual for someone to come here with no design experience, and no woodworking experience, and no business experience. We start from the beginning, from where you are at, and build from there. If you have experience, great we will check it out to see if the basics are sound then you will work at your own pace . If you are unsure take it steady, you are not in a competition against anyone here, just with yourself . Take your time get it right, we will teach at your pace, not ours.

"Teaching and learning is not a top down process here, it is something we are all doing at all times, especially me. I spend a great deal of money each year on my education, I have my gurus and I shall be passing their knowledge on to you as I get it. Hopefully giving you a usable marketing edge and advantage."

David Savage

This man is Senior Craftsman Daren Millman - apprentice trained cabinet maker with sixteen years experience and "one of the best makers and also one of the best teachers I know".David Savage

Daren is amazing, he is one of those quiet, calm people that never get flustered and always seem to have an answer to your problem. Daren Millman is the senior cabinetmaker at Rowden workshops. As such he is responsible for much of the woodworking technical teaching and the new development work within the workshop. If you have a joint that wont fit or a drawing to detail go see Daren.

"Always there, helpful, excellent at explaining,very patient and interested" James Richardson student 2006

This is Steve Perry - Trainee cabinetmaker and carbon fibre expert .

Steve is a maker to his finger tips you can see it in everything he does. He served his apprenticeship with London Transport where the first year had a training in joinery. He has since worked in aircraft fitting and aircraft interiors industry before taking a place with MacLaren Racing as a body carbon fibre specialist. He has worked on cars for David Coultard, Mika Hakkinen, the 2008 world champion Kimi Raikkonen and in his first year of racing in Formula one Lewis Hamilton. Over the comming years we believe that Steve will become one of the best makers around and a very useful member of our team. Steve will be playing an increasing role in the teaching of our students particularly in the early weeks.

The Rowden Experience...Not top down teaching.

This place is unusual to say the least, others are copying our systems, and thats O K but Rowden Workshops are special. The place is special, inspiring, we are situated in the most beautiful part of English countryside, countryside so beautiful that it would inspire a sonnet. We base our teaching systems upon a medaeval teaching workshop system called an "Atalier". An Atalier would have a Master Artist or Craftsman, senior assistant craftsmen, makers, journeymen, apprentices. All would be learning at different levels at different times, and freqently learning by doing. "Let me show you this, then you try it out, see how you go, dont worry too much if that saw goes off line, watch what is happening, watch that line like a hawk, your body is a wonderful mechanism, it will correct your stance and the cut will come straight if you allow it "

This is Assistant Craftsman Keith Fernley, with us only for a short three month project. Discussing a students dining table base during tea break .

Its common to have pieces of work being made in workshops nearby by skilled makers some of whom we have known and worked with for many years. Occasionally we have visiting makers join us to work with David for a single project. In this case Keith was working with two students line managing a pair of complex cabinets and working with David on a new chair design.

Join us at a point in the year that suits you.

We start students every three months in February, June, September and November. This way someone is only a few months ahead of you. "Its amazing how much I have learnt in the three months since I joined, " said Jim to me recently. Also the newcomers have someone nearby who recently has been where they are now. "I find my very best students are the ones who share their understanding freely. There is no compulsion to do it, but always the ones that share get the most out of this place. For us teaching is a way of making sense of the world. " Find out about a students day here

Two great courses built around what you need.

• LEARN Superb making skills.
• UNDERSTAND About providing genuine customer service.
• DEVELOP design skills.
• GAIN Business realism, marketing skills, and careful costings.
• GROW Entrepreneurial aims and objectives.

The Designer Maker Course: take the risk, but control it.

Have you had enough of working for "the man".The Designer Maker Course is for those of you who have had enough of working for other people, you want to paddle your own boat but need guidance on the obstactles and hazards ahead of them. They are always people who understand the creative need to take risks and control those risks. This is a course about risk management .

Going out on your own needs courage no doubt about that, but more than that it needs control. You do not need to take more risks than you have to. We will show you how to enter the market without making a shed load of product that you dont know will sell. We will show how to set up economically so your overheads are low and how to take your new ideas, products and services to market effectively and quickly. This is small business niche marketing not as taught in colleges but as taught by somone who has done it himself not once, but time after time.

In this course you will spend the first four months learning how to handle tools and learning about materials. Timber is a phenominal material, after thirty years David says he is still learning about it. This is part of its attraction, its warmth its workability, its variety. The best way to learn about wood is through using hand tools. You will learn about accuracy, about saws, planes, chisels and many other tools and you will learn to handle the tools confidently. There are a few, a very few, projects that we have developed over the years. Once they are done those at the start you are able to choose what you want to make. David hates "modules" in teaching, saying "it is a sloppy way of fitting the students needs into the needs of the teaching establishment.''

Build your "portfolio" these are your credentials.

Once you have these primary skills by month four to five you will have the option to make what you want, or what your client wants. Yes, you can make for a client or a friend who will act like a client . We urge you to use this time to build your portfolio this will be your first few pieces of work. This will be the start of you developing you own style your own aesthetic. You may be artistic, or this may be just starting to emerge under Davids guidance, choose carefully what you want to do with this time. You could develop, with Davids help a range of furniture to be sold direct through exhibitions [we will tell you how to do this as well], you could make pieces for friends or relatives acting as clients. These are great ways to learn to deal with real customers and David will be there to offer help as you make the visits, develop the client brief do the drawings and eventually get the cheque, oh yes thats the most satisfying part.

Before the end of the year you should have a genuine plan for your business developed with the help of an experienced business man.

By the end of the year you should have a plan of how to get your business on the road, a few carefully crafted products and more knowledge about how to take the next step than you realise. If our previous students are anything to go by it will take you a couple of further years of hard work to get to a stable predictable income but you should be able to make some profit straight away. Predicability is the aim, after all one of the definitions of a real business is predictability.

Build your own Portfolio of work this will be your Credentials this will be how you represent yourself, how you sell yourself to your future clients.

Your portfolio says who you are and how far you are down your journey. At the beginning you may only have a couple of pieces of work to show, make the best of them have detail shots and really good studio photographs. David will work with you to get those shots and show you how to do it yourself. Use drawings of future projects, create maquettes or scale models of pieces, light them and photograph them against a white background so the scale is lost. Build your personal visual language. Do it a step at a time

We all have the ability to be more creative.

We all have a side of our brain that is more attuned to holistic intuative, visual and musical thought. Creativity is a process of assembling ideas from existing material just in a new way. Not just lateral thinking but three dimensional thinking, gathering up processes, images and methods to produce something new. "Design is intelligence made visible." Terance Conran

"Drawing is a natural extension of what we ask you to do in the workshop, we ask our students to use their eyes in an extra ordinarily intense way, to look much harder than usual to see really see if a surface is flat if a curve is true. Drawing is synagious to this. Drawing is looking, the more you draw the better you see, and, like any muscle the better you will become at looking, and seeing." david savage

"My reasons for going to study abroad included a strong desire to do something big, something unique. The pieces I'd seen on David's website and the description of the course struck a chord for me immediately. I wanted to learn how to make beautiful, functional pieces of art. And I did learn. I learned from David, from Daren, and from the other students around me. I have new skills, new friends, and a new outlook on life. It is a positive outlook that comes from within--from the same place that a new design originates. Now that I'm back in the States, people ask me about the things I gained from my year on the course. The last sentence of my ramble is usually something like, " I think being immersed in an environment day in and day out, where quality of that sort is expected, you have no choice but to meet those expectations. Those standards become your own." Moreover, it was just plain fun. I have become a true advocate for quality and imagination in my new work, my new life.

David Redwine.

www.redwinefurniture .com

"I could say a lot about the year I spent at Rowden and in Devon generally.For me though,the key thing was being able to learn skills and techniques to design and make quality furniture that surpasses the standards of many practicing makers, in the space of just 12 months. I still can't believe it!! It helped being surrounded by students with a similar desire to create beautiful pieces of furniture."

Thanks david.
Greig Fensome
March 2007

www.hiddenink.co.uk

The Makers Course

The makers course is exactly the same as the Designer Makers Course, except that it is aimed at those of you who for whatever reason cannot take the risk of setting yourself up as a furniture designer maker right now. The act of changing direction from the job or place you are in now to your new future as a furniture maker, that alone is enough. Becoming a great maker is enough for now. In this year you keep everything you make in the first six months but in the second six months you will become an unpaid member of staff makeing for Davids clients or making pieces to davids degn for galleries. We expect you to have got up to that high standard of work in six short months . Everything you make in workshop hours during the second six months will remain with the workshop when you leave. At the end of that time we will help you select a short list of potential workshops to approach for a job. We will tell you how to best go about it and provide you with photographs of the pieces you have made for us to date

To secure a good job as an improver your attitude and your core skills are what really count .

I have every respect for people who feel that they need qualifications to become a furniture maker. I have played my part in the establishment of National Vocation Qualifications in Hand Crafted furniture levels 1 to 3 and seen those qualifications systematically destroyed over the past twenty years. When a maker comes here for a job the last thing I do is look at his or her qualifications, I see their work, in photographs and in real life, I ask them to do some work for me to see how they go about it, I check out their tools, they say a lot. Its called a trade test, every good workshop does something similar, and I call up the last guy that was his trainer or employer and ask whats this girl really like to work with. In this context your portfolio and your attitude is what counts.

"Hi David, and everyone else in the school. I'm just writing to tell you that the moment I got back I had job offers llike crazy. I accepted a job at "Wasatch Woodwrights Inc". and I now am making beautiful furniture and some cabinetry. Because of what I was taught at the School I started out as the second highest paid employee, and am loving my job! I just want to tell you thanks David for all the skills I learned while attending your school. They have made a huge difference in my job options. I am also building furniture on the side my boss lets me use his whole shop for my own projects. Thanks again David, please keep in touch I need you to motivate me into drawing and painting more.

And for those of you who are thinking about going to school at David's workshop I can not say enough good things about it. It was the best year of my life and if I was rich I would still be there and I guarantee I'd still be learning the whole time".

Reed Stanley
April 2007

P.S. "please throw something at Harry for me."

TICK-TOCK, TICK-TOCK..................great thing time, just keeps ticking away, sooo..... maybe, why are you continuing to do something you dont like.....??

What it costs

"The Designer Maker Course" costs seventeen Thousand Pounds £17,000 GBP . "The Maker Course" costs Thirteen Thousand pounds £13,000 GBP. This is your investment in yourself. Check out the great work being done by our existing students,student work see the new emerging businesses set up by former students and see the established workshops. All are changing and growing step at a time. You could do this with the proper training.

Our Guarantee. Risk free try out.

Taking a year out is a big step. We know this and have helped many people take that step. We know that managing the risk is the key to it so we will help you assess this workshop at no cost to yourself. David Savage occasionally runs one week Masterclasses with only two or three students. Take the "Basics" Masterclass the cost of this is £750 plus the cost of tools that you would be learning to sharpen. That week is based on the first week of the one year course you will need to have tools anyway and this week will get you using them properly. Get the feel of the place, meet the students talk with the staff try it out. If you then can pay a deposit on a one year Designer Maker Course before the end of your week we will discount your year course fee by £750.

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